PBS host takes publishing industry to task over lack of diversity

Updated 1:55 pm, Friday, June 6, 2014

Tavis Smiley has written a book about Martin Luther King Jr., “the greatest American this country has ever produced.”

Tavis Smiley has written a book about Martin Luther King Jr., “the greatest American this country has ever produced.”

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PBS host takes publishing industry to task over lack of diversity

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NEW YORK — In honoring the recently deceased Maya Angelou and Martin Luther King Jr., television host and author Tavis Smiley urged the publishing industry to “dig a little deeper” to tell a broader range of Americans' stories.

“Each of us has a story. Each of us is a story,” Smiley, whose new book “Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Final Year” publishes in September, told an almost exclusively white crowd of hundreds of booksellers, publishers, agents and librarians gathered last week for Book Expo at the Jacob Javits Convention Center for the publishing industry's annual convention.

“The publishing industry should work a little harder, dig a little deeper to help citizens of color get their stories told.”

Smiley, the only nonwhite speaker of 16 at Book Expo's major panels, perhaps was responding to reports in the past few weeks of the industry's poor racial diversity.

“There is a lot of work to do in this multiracial, multicultural, multiethnic America,” said Smiley. “We have got to reflect a broader perspective of what is America.”

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“You only need to look at the abysmally low number of kids books by people of color that the industry publishes to sense that the problem is deeper than Book Expo,” Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Díaz recently told the Associated Press.

A recent study from the University of Wisconsin found that a tiny percentage of books published last year featured non-white characters.

The boards of prominent industry organizations such as the American Booksellers Association have very little minority representation.

ABA CEO Oren Teicher also recently acknowledged in an AP story that racial diversity is “absolutely something we could be working harder at. But it has been a struggle.”

Smiley, who grew up one of 13 children in '60s in the only black family in a small, northern Indiana town, knows the value of being able to see yourself in books.

“The only relationship I had with the outside world of negroes was through reading, and one of those books was by Maya Angelou,” he said of the poet who died May 28 at age 86.

Smiley said he was especially inspired by Angelou's poem “Still I Rise,” which begins: “You may write me down in history/With your bitter, twisted lies/You may trod me in the very dirt/But still, like dust, I rise.”

“We are who we are because somebody loved us,” said Smiley, host of shows on public television and public radio, and the author of more than a dozen books. “I am who I am because somebody loved me, and Maya Angelou loved me.

“But it's not enough to celebrate her life,” he added. “We must recognize that everyone of us in this great nation has a voice.”

Turning to his upcoming book on King, Smiley said he was fortunate enough to be given a collection of the civil rights leader's recorded speeches on LP at age 12.

“I'm hearing the richness of his voice, the love in his heart, the hope in his soul,” he recalled. “At age 12 I became a student of Dr. King. I'm 50 now and have been studying him all this time.”

Why another King book now? Smiley asked.

He said he wrote the book because the three major issues King sweated and fought over — racism, poverty and militarism — remain some of the most prevalent issues in the country half a century later.

“King has now been sterilized, sanitized and even lionized so we don't see him as he really was,” said Smiley, whose book closely tracks the last year of King's life. “Now is the time to get all our consciousnesses, individually and collectively, to look at just who Dr. King was.”